


Binary

by veritascara



Series: Ad Astra [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Episode: s04e07 Kindred, Established Relationship, F/M, Force Visions, Introspection, Meditation, Missing Scene, Pregnancy, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-20
Updated: 2018-06-20
Packaged: 2019-05-26 02:47:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14991101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/veritascara/pseuds/veritascara
Summary: During a frustrating morning’s meditation on Lothal, Kanan makes a startling discovery and is forced to face a fear he’s never experienced before.Set during "Kindred."





	Binary

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [Anoray](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anoray/pseuds/Anoray) and [uhura_ismylastname](https://archiveofourown.org/users/uhura_ismylastname/pseuds/uhura_ismylastname) for their wonderful beta assistance!

Kanan sighs as he listens to Hera’s footsteps retreat behind him and feels the bright star that is her presence in the Force retreat into the hills once more, dimming only slightly with the increase in distance. Her signature is like a beacon. It beckons him to follow, and for a moment, he considers abandoning his meditation to follow her and help with whatever preparations she is currently engaged in. Her work never ends. And it’s not like his meditation is going well anyways.

He’d asked the Force questions. It had refused to give answers. _Such is the way of things_ , he supposes. This is nothing new; it’s just that today the answers feel simultaneously more urgent and more elusive, like hidden dangers approaching within a thick fog. He shakes his head, as if that might help clear it, and growls in frustration.

Of course that doesn’t help either.

Ready to give up, he rises up on his knees to stand when a voice, a memory, bubbles up in his mind.

_Always in motion the future is. Difficult to see._

The voice might have been Master Yoda’s. It certainly sounds like something he would have once said to all the younglings in the crèche. One of a litany of sayings that felt confusing at the time, and yet now . . .

Now it sort of makes sense? At least enough that it stays his motions. Kanan sinks back down to sit on his heels and releases a deep breath. Somehow over the years, many such enigmatic platitudes have taken on meaning, and he can feel the truth in this one as well.

He’s been seeking to understand the future, the why, the purpose in their repeated returns to Lothal. But those are questions without answers yet—the future still too uncertain, too easily warped or influenced by foreknowledge. He has to let them go. The only answers he might hope to find today lie in the present.

Or perhaps there are no answers at all, and it is the questions themselves that are important. He doesn’t know. There is only one way to find out.

He stills his mind and reaches out again, letting the Force guide his senses across the plains to hear, to feel, to know its workings in the world around him—the rustle of dry grass in the breeze, the acrid smell of smoke permeating the atmosphere, the growth of roots extending their way deep into the soil, despite the hardships above. Each living thing speaks to him, inaudible voices telling their stories.

Stories of change, stories of impermanence.

A hundred meters away, a hungry loth-cat pounces in the grass, capturing a small rodent for its breakfast. Leaves decompose and worms return their nutrients to the earth, ready to feed the future. Pollution and drought still the growth cycle of the green daisies; their seeds lie dormant under the soil in hope that the rains and warmth of a future season might bring them back into the sunlight again.

Stories of balance—life and death, light and dark.

Together they weave a dynamic tapestry of living, dying, breathing, renewing creation, straining at the seams to be seen, to be heard, their voices lifted in the song of a grand symphony proclaiming joy and lamentation in turns, audible to the very few with the ability to listen—too few.

But as he listens, he becomes acutely aware that the laments are too loud, the joys far too little. The very earth below his knees cries out in wordless desperation for balance, for restoration, for the rain and the sun and the freedom to grow on its own terms. The aching of the land burrows its way into his very core and nestles there, its seed ready to grow, as if he were a part of the ground itself.

Farther out in the tall grasses he feels the hard stare of a pair of eyes fixed on him, the presence of another, larger creature moving, listening. He tries to trace its shape with the Force, but it shifts to evade his scrutiny, as if it senses him reaching out. And almost as quickly as it appeared, it vanishes. All sense of it disappears save a rapidly dissipating echo in the Force.

A cold breeze blows across Kanan’s face. He shivers, and his mind instinctively seeks out something familiar. Something warm and tangible.

Hera.

He stretches his senses further, drawn back to their camp, to Hera’s glow, as a moth to a flame. Hera, for all her foibles, is his rock, his touchstone, the longstanding constant in a life plagued with uncertainty.

It is the work of an instant to find her in the Force. As always, she is laser focused on the tasks at hand, her mind set on her work, her emotions steady and calm. She lies on the floor of the u-wing’s cockpit, calibrating the old ship’s controls with a precision beyond anything he could have ever hoped to develop. Engrossed, he pictures a small smile crossing her face; her lips move with the motions of a mumbled melody.

Hera often hummed or sang softly as she worked, but usually only when she thought no one could hear. It had taken years—long after their relationship had turned intimate—for her to be comfortable enough with his presence to do so openly.

He presses even deeper into the Force, willing it to carry her voice to his ears, and he sinks into its depths with contentment when a few words of Ryl sung in her lovely alto float into his mind, their sound sweet and hypnotic, like something he might have heard as a very young child as he drifted off to sleep in the temple nursery.

The words dance around in his mind, intertwining themselves with the music of the Force in the planet around him, her lyrics and melody a sweet counterpoint to its wordless, aching harmony.

_Ji ann ohk a'k vil rha guo_

_Koa gutkurrs toyid ehan dan si'user_

His Ryl has never been the greatest, but he knows the song speaks something of being safe and of the moons, and something else of the gutkurrs, one of Ryloth’s legendary fearsome creatures. And it strikes him that he’s never noticed the plaintive, mournful note embedded in the song’s melody before, even though he has heard it many times—that while the song’s words might proclaim safety, the melody rings of a safety dearly bought, a heavy price paid.

Kanan shudders with the thought.

He tries to linger and listen on to Hera’s voice, but she suddenly ceases singing and sits up, moving onto another task. At first he grasps at the song’s echoes, but quickly realizes it is an exercise in futility, and he pulls himself away to look elsewhere in the Force. For a brief moment, he feels a tiny pull in the Force, like a loose thread snagged on a wire—something, some unexamined question whispering at him to look back at Hera again, but he might as well move on now. Hera is a constant. He needs to find where the Force is shifting.

His attention drifts now to Sabine. She crouches underneath the ship's sublight engine, rerouting wires, her brows knit together and her lips pursed nearly white with concentration. Chopper stands by her side, welding the cables into place at her direction, sometimes in spite of it.

A small burst of anxiety shoots through Kanan as it strikes him anew just how rickety the old ship actually is—the old ship that Hera will have to rely on to get her safely back to Rebel Command—if they can even secure the hyperdrive into it. But he sighs and lets his fear go. Hera knows what she is about, and he trusts her instincts, skills, and judgment. That will have to be enough.

Hera. Why does he keep coming back to Hera?

He presses harder to turn his focus away and escape her orbit, soaring far across the Lothal plains and around the mountain spires to find his padawan. Ezra, Zeb, and Jai race northward, and he finds it soothing, almost hypnotic to follow their steady progress as the fertile grasslands give way to more rocky, barren terrain, the ground eventually becoming covered with patches of days-old snow hidden in the shadows of lichen-covered rocks.

Ezra himself is steady and focused, yet almost carefree, as he threads his speeder through the tight channels between the hills. The knowledge that he is doing everything possible to save his home from the Empire drives him forward. His being radiates light, in a way Kanan had once feared might not be possible.

There had been so many times when the darkness had threatened to gnaw away at Ezra from the inside out—his fears, his loss, his anger closing him off from others and pulling him towards the dark side and danger. He’d had to open up to Kanan; Kanan had had to open up to him. Only then had they begun to find a balance and Ezra his center wholly within the light.

And look how he glows now.

Not that Kanan can take all the credit for that. The relationships they’d all built with Ezra had done their part. Hera had nurtured and mentored him, Sabine had befriended and built a deep trust with him. Zeb had grown to care for him. And Chopper . . . well, even Chopper was surprisingly fond and protective of him.

Family has given them all strength. It changed Ezra, but it has also changed him. The long years where he’d wandered the galaxy on his own feel so distant now, but he can recall in an instant the aching loneliness and emptiness that pervaded his existence before he’d met Hera. He cannot imagine who he’d be without her. Their relationship had begun his transformation, Ezra had helped complete it.

He’d healed.

While some childhood lessons have taken on meaning over the years, Kanan still wonders what the Jedi really meant when they’d taught him as a child to avoid attachment. As a kid he’d heard that and thought that he was supposed to avoid romantic relationships of all shapes and sizes. When he found himself wandering alone, that was easy. And when he’d first met Hera, indulging in loving her had felt like his own private rebellion against the life that had failed him.

But he’d long since reasoned that there must be more to the concept than his fourteen-year-old brain had absorbed. He wonders how his relationship with Hera would stack up now.

Dear Hera. He considers the painful irony that, of the two of them, it is Hera who would be better at practicing whatever the Jedi’s rules regarding attachment really were, at least in the strictest sense. She’s always been better suited to it. Whenever he’d pressed their relationship forward emotionally, she’d pushed back, keeping something in reserve, holding some small part of herself free. She has always seemed ready to let go if the need arose.

Kanan squashes the old, rising bitterness down as quickly as it blooms in his chest.

He knows why she does it, and truthfully he loves her for it. Hera wouldn’t be Hera without her fearless, single-minded dedication. Only sometimes, especially lately, that dedication has felt much more like a facade to hide behind, pressing herself forward with abandon while inside she falls apart. Atollon burned and scarred her, the same way Malachor had him—less obvious on the surface, but just as deep. He just wishes she’d let him help her. Let him in.

Kanan feels the Force rapidly slipping from his grasp as his thoughts spiral away, and he scrambles to clear his mind and drop back into its flow around him. As he does, he startles to realize that just as his thoughts have wandered, so has his focus. He left Ezra behind long ago, and Hera’s gravitational pull has captured him again. Now she’s before him shining as brightly as ever.

He really shouldn’t be surprised.

His first impulse is irritation. He is supposed to be meditating, searching the planet for direction, for guidance, yet here he is again, obsessing about and gazing on his lover over and over like a kid with a crush. Once more he tries to direct his focus away towards the wider world, but this time, the Force pulls back insistently, an invisible, small hand gently wrapping around his finger and guiding him towards her.

The Force wants to show him . . . Hera?

Why?

Kanan takes a deep breath and sets aside his annoyance and frustration. He clears the cluttered thoughts from his mind and sets them free with a deep breath, falling deeper into the Force. He quiets the outside world, tuning out the scurrying loth-cats, the warbling birds, even the chilly breeze that gusts past him every now and then, to allow himself to draw nearer to her.

Hera hasn’t gone far. She stands on the ground outside the u-wing now. Her eyes narrow as she studies the diagnostic reports she has run on the ship. For a moment, he wishes he could read them himself, but it wouldn’t make any difference.

Sensing nothing changed in her demeanor, Kanan falls deeper—past the surface, past the visible—to look at her essence through the Force itself. It’s a luxury he doesn’t allow himself often, to see her like this—far too sacred for an everyday occurrence.

And how she glows. He can always feel her star—her bright warmth his home and heart—but to see her is another thing entirely. She is dazzling, radiant, everything he never deserved in all the universe.

But there is something different about her light today. He draws closer, searches deeper, shifts his perspective, unable to put his finger on the change at first, until he finally sees it: an unfamiliar flicker floating, yet somehow not consumed, by her side. Like a single, tiny kyber next to the brilliance of a blazing yellow star, its minuscule, pulsing light is nearly outshone. He doesn’t understand how he can see it at all, except that it feels right, familiar, in a way he can’t put his finger on. It feels like something of Hera, but it does not feel like Hera—the same, yet different.

Intrigued, he plunges deeper into the Force, submerging himself into its murky depths like a diver into an ocean’s riptide. He lets it carry him along, until his senses cease and everything around him vanishes into tiny points of light glittering in the blackness of a distant starfield. The lights he seeks to decipher hang freely nearby and blaze against the darkness.

He lets the warm orange of his own sun drift closer to Hera’s bright gold and reaches out towards the tiny light, longing to catch it in his hands and examine it. It evades his grasp. He cannot reach it, but he can see it more clearly, and he can feel its truth.

The light is everything; the light is nothing. It’s hope. It’s a seed waiting to be planted on fertile soil, a kyber heart ready to be enfolded in stardust and born anew as a celestial being of its own.

No, it can’t be . . .

Kanan’s breath catches, and his thoughts stop just a moment. _Once a secret is known, it cannot be unknown_ , the Bendu’s words echo in his mind—an admonition, a warning.

He surges deeper anyways. He _has_ to know. He can feel its necessity heavy in the Force.

All conscious thoughts in his mind and the passage of time around him cease, and Kanan gapes in awe as time speeds up, or maybe it stops—he doesn’t know—and the star and the light begin an intricate dance as old as life and the Force itself. The star captures the kyber in its orbit, and gracefully both begin to spin, weaving themselves together in time with the symphony of the universe swelling around them.

The light grows.

He can do nothing but watch, his being filling with equal parts joy and horror.

The music surges to a cacophony, sounds assaulting his mind.

_“Kanan!”_

It grows.

_‘I’m pregnant.’_

Clothing itself in material spun off its parent.

_Hera screams._

And grows.

_The squall of a small being nestled on her chest._

Into a binary system, perfectly balanced.

_‘We have a son.’_

The small star now blue and hot and so, so bright.

“Aagh!” Kanan shouts incoherently, gasping for air like a drowning man as he rips his mind out of the Force. He struggles to rise to the surface, barely able to even discern which way is up.

When his awareness returns, he finds his arms braced in front of him, his fingernails rooted in the soil in the desperate need to cling to something terrestrial. The birds are still singing, the grass still rustling with every breath of wind that blows by—the quiet peace of the landscape an eerie contrast to the maelstrom now raging within him.

He rips the mask off his face, tosses it to the ground, and sits back on his heels in a bid to get more air into his oxygen-starved lungs. No matter how much he tries to center himself and slow his breathing, it feels like a lost cause.

Hera’s pregnant, or at least very soon will be. Pregnant with their child—his child. The discovery is overwhelming; emotions buffet him from every side. While it fills his heart with exquisite joy, it’s hard for his mind to find anything but fear—intense, visceral fear.

It’s a fear unlike anything he’s felt before. Fear _for_ Hera—her health, her safety, the dangerous mission she’s preparing to undertake, the war raging around them threatening all their lives—has been a part of their lives to some degree since Gorse. But lurking deeper, Kanan feels something even more disturbing—fear _of_ Hera.

Because what will Hera want to do? Everything she has never wanted to discuss in ten years—family, the defining borders of their relationship, any personal future at all—are personified in the tiny creation she now carries in her body. And, while it’s about as contrary to the old Jedi ways, and as impractical in their current life as he can imagine, having a child with her is something he wants, has always wanted. But it ultimately isn’t his decision alone to make.

Kanan growls and runs his fingers over his hair, and for just a moment he tries to reach out with the Force again, wishing there was someone older, wiser he could _talk_ to about all of this. Half-remembered quotes aren’t enough right now.

But no one answers. The Force, which was just minutes earlier resounding with song, is now quiet.

_Of course the Force is silent now._

His frustration builds, a painful pressure growing steadily in his mind. “Well, now I know. Great,” he speaks to the emptiness. “That’s what you wanted, right? What do you expect me to do with this?” His volume rises with each word.

But the only sound he hears in reply is the whistling of the wind. He presses harder, only to find his mind an empty echo chamber, reverberating his own spiraling thoughts.

Frustration circles back to fear.

He stumbles to his feet. Even his sense of place is off in the Force, and for the first time in over a year he feels his blindness, heavy on him like a thick blanket around his head.  He shoves back his tumultuous emotions as best as he can to try to feel his way again. It takes him a minute to reorient himself and find the direction of the camp, but as soon as he does he begins walking, a single objective filling his mind.

Hera. He has to find Hera and tell her . . . something . . . about this before she returns to the stars, taking her destiny into her own hands yet again and the still-unknown hope of their future with her.

He just wishes he knew what.

**Author's Note:**

> The next story in this series, "The Signs," will be posted on Friday or Saturday. The angst train's a comin'. My apologies.


End file.
